Unintended Adventures

Tag: Fuselage

Cleanup and introductions

Since I decided to go back to school, building has slowed down considerably, BUT we’re still getting stuff down. My goal for the year is to get the fuselage covered and painted so I can final install parts while I wait to buy an engine/avionics.

This past weekend was a good aviation weekend. I was able to meet another S-20 builder in the Midwest and we looked at my project and another local S-20 project. Always fun talking about airplanes. I did get about 1.5 hours of work done on my plane Saturday morning. The activity of the morning was finishing up the bottom boot cowl stiffeners. As of now, I am ready to start drilling holes into the boot cowl bottom and sides from the stiffeners.

(3 h)


One issue I ran into with the boot cowl sides was how they cover the tabs where the cowl will attach to the firewall/boot cowl (I’m assuming). My sides don’t completely cover these tabs completely. I’m a little worried about the edge distances on them, but I haven’t bothered to ask RANS yet. My weeks have been crazy busy lately. Go figure.


On Sunday, Maria was around to help and we got the “shop” all cleaned up and all the remaining parts on the parts board. I had originally put up most stuff paying more attention to items for the wings. That time has passed, so we re-organized the board and got all the remaining loose items on the board. Should be a lot easier to find things now (I hope).

We also worked on some of the aileron pulleys since we could work on it together and we would have something to show for our work in the end. I need to get the rudder pulleys installed, but I was thinking about those so we got some aileron cables done. There is one pulley that I will have to unbolt when I install the cables, but it won’t be that big of a deal to do.

Getting started again

I didn’t do any work on the plane since before Christmas. Between traveling and starting school again there wasn’t enough time.

Yesterday I had the help of a friend who was very helpful and we got a lot done. Not much to see, but it was a decent amount of work. I’ll get some pictures in the next update which hopefully is only a week or so away.

Our work was focused on wrapping up the side and bottom boot cowl skins. We got all the tabs drilled out on the skins and fabricated the stiffeners. That was about 3.5 hours of work all together. We spent about an hour screwing around with the right side skin. For some reason, things just didn’t line up the way we had planned and the side skin ended up not covering all of the tabs that are on the forward side of the firewall. We found that by moving it a little everything looked better. The problem was that the holes in the skin no longer lined up with the tabs on the fuselage. I’m a very indecisive person when it comes to stuff, but we finally set ourselves on a path to fix it. We ended up enlarging the two aft holes in the top of the skin to 3/16″ so it would have a tight fit and not just a gaping hole. Time will tell if I obsess of a 1/16″ difference in rivet sizes for two rivets (I think I will forget, eventually).

With my friend’s help, we made quick work of getting the skin rolled, holes drilled, and other various tasks to make sure the fit was good. The stiffeners were also short work with two people working on different tasks.

My next step is to finish transfer drilling the holes from the stiffeners to the boot cowl skins and then moving onward. I believe the top skin and panel fit up are next.

Getting closer to covering time! On that note, I haven’t done any additional covering since my last post.

(6 h)

The progression

Continuing to work on the fuselage. The big tasks lately are the seats, forward baggage compartment, and beginning the work on the boot cowl.

I have the seat frames built and one has been finished. I messed up the seat rail block that goes on the bottom seat frame, so I’m waiting on an additional one from RANS. I took a look at the updates they made to the seat system and I like the new one better. But, they don’t seem to have problems with the previous one, so I can’t be too fussy. The new style has the adjustment pieces on both fuselage tubes. That was the biggest thing I liked.

I pretty much have the forward baggage compartment finished now. I need to install the nut plates.

I started working on the boot cowl. The first item of business was fitting up the firewall. This was pretty straight forward. I would definitely have a good drill bit since the firewall is some pretty tough stuff. I was using a wood block held in my hand to hold the firewall against the fuselage while I was drilling. Well on one of my last holes I was drilling I was reflecting on how much it would hurt to find your hand with a drill bit and how I hoped I was holding the block in the right place. Wouldn’t you know I was slightly off. That resulted in a decent little injury to my palm. I’ll spare the pictures. It didn’t look too bad anyway without all the blood. It was only a #30 drill bit. I don’t do well with blood so I had to sit outside and cool off while not thinking about what I had done (which is impossible). That reset the injury free work days; 8 months was a good stretch.

In other exciting news, I’m planning on covering an aileron this weekend. I decided to switch over to Stewart Systems for the aircraft covering. The paint is still pretty hazardous, but the glue is much better to work with at the house.

I’ll get some pictures up soon.

(13 h)

Fuselage Work

I haven’t posted an update in a while for a lack of pictures. We’ve been making somewhat steady progress.

The first thing was to attach various stringers to the Fuselage to provide a shape for the fabric covering. This wasn’t hard, but was somewhat tedious and I spent a few days working on it a little at a time. I did have one screw up which I’m thinking will be an easy fix. The stringer that is on the top of the fuselage from the tail to the aft of the cabin didn’t stay flush with the tube from the vertical stabilizer. So I have a small gap at that spot, but I think I will be able to just put some filler in the gap and smooth it out and not worry about much. The rest of the stingers were pretty straightforward. My fuselage is powder coated, so I had to remove the powder coating so I could slip the stringers on.

The next task was to attach some antenna mount plates and fit up the floor board. The antenna plates were simple and went out without much trouble. The floorboard fits right in, but you do have to cut out part of the flange on the left and right side of the floor board where it interferes with cross tubes in the frame. I also had to remove some material on the aft of the floorboard to make space for some welds. All in all it was easy to do.

After the floorboard was able to sit flat, I had to drill out the floorboard where it contacted some tabs in the fuselage. The size varied, so it’s important to double check everything. Once they were all drilled, I attached nut plates to some of the tabs. Some of them already had holes for the rivets, but a few I had ti drill out myself.

My next task was attaching the baggage window trim panel on the outside of the fuselage. The manual has you make sure everything is lined up and equal and then drill holes into the trim panel through the mounting tabs on the fuselage.

One of the areas I’m working on now is the baggage compartment. This caused me a little heartache in the beginning because I just couldn’t get everything lined up right. First, I assembled the aft compartment outside of the fuselage and drilled the three holes in the aft corners as called out by the manual. I then placed it in the plane and attempted to get it to fix. We couldn’t get it to sit flat against the cross tube and we gave up for the evening to talk with Ed at RANS. After talking with Ed, I loosened up the tape holding stuff together and I also removed the clecos. What I figured out was that the back of the baggage compartment has two pre drilled holes at the top corners. This corresponds to the tabs in the fuselage. This helped set where everything else would go. I then started getting the floor and sides in place. I did remove some material of the baggage compartment floor because it didn’t seem like it would fit right. I still think I had too much material, but it looks fine. (Note: RANS says everything should be an exact fit and you shouldn’t have to remove any material.) I got all the sides to line up about halfway on the tubes and then taped it all up like a mad man. The holes I previously drilled in the aft corners lined up at this point so I clecoed them back together. Then I started to drill holes through the tabs and into the baggage compartment, clecoing as I went. After I got all the holes drilled and clecoed I started to cut the stiffeners to size and locating all the holes along them. You do have to modify the flanges in certain spots to avoid some fuselage tubes. Like other things on the fuselage, it’s not hard to do, just a little tedious. The wing is pretty cut and dry so it spoils a novice builder :-).

I still have the forward baggage compartment to make, but I hope to get that done in the next few days.

The other current project is building up the seats. RANS sells a very complete kit. I have all the upholstery so they will be done done when I get it done.

Maria has been helping a lot with the seats and we should have them finished by Thanksgiving. We have the seat assemblies completes and we are working on sizing the seat internal tube. We stopped at this point the other day because I wanted to clarify it’s purpose. It serves as a sort of anti-crush bushing. The seat frame tube is under bent and when you start attaching the cushions, it bends the frame in. The seat internal tube helps maintain the proper spacing so it sits correctly on the fuselage tubes. One thing we thought would make life easy is to assemble the tangs and bearings and hold it all together with a 1/4″ bolt while you rivet the tangs to the seat frame. If you don’t, then the best way we found was to assemble the bearings and washer one at a time while inserting the bolt. Then remove the bolt to attach the seat back frame. Fun stuff.

Finally, here are some pictures of everything as it stands today. It’s really starting to look like a plane now!

(25 h)

 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

The wings are ready!

Today the right wing was moved to its temporary home while awaiting covering. It was a lot of fun and went very quick since I didn’t have the learning curve of the first wing. A friend helped me finish sanding down the filler on the leading edge and off we went.

That also meant it was time to finally bring the fuselage home to work on. It was great to see it sitting in the garage after not seeing it in all its glory for about 7 months haha. I’m looking forward to learning some new skills and going through all the challenges of the fuselage.

In other news, we seem to have found an N-number for the plane; N611SU. 611 is my wedding day and 1SU looks like ISU when written in block letters. I’ve got another one reserved, but I think this one will be the one. I also need to start thinking about paint for the plane.

(3 h)


  
  

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